Lies my teachers taught me

Then, last week, scientists announced that Triceratops never existed; it was actually the juvenile form of a different dinosaur.

If you grew up in the 1970s, are you starting to feel that everything you learned in school is now useless? How am I supposed to help my kids with their homework when science keeps disproving everything I was ever taught?

Back then, life was simple. Columbus was a hero, participles never dangled, we were all going to live on the moon by 2000 and cursive was something you'd use for the rest of your life.

Did you know that red, blue and yellow are not the primary colors?! As any kid literate in computer graphics can tell you today, the true primary colors – the ones that cannot be produced by mixing two colors together – are actually magenta, cyan and yellow. There goes everything I learned in 6th grade art class. (And since the highlight of home ec was playing the botulism vomiting movie backwards, you can pretty much discount all my middle school electives.)

Did you know that stretching before running is considered a waste of time and actually bad for you? Sports medicine research now says my phys ed teacher was all wrong.

How 'bout the fact that the American Academy of Ophthalmology claims that sitting too close to the TV causes no physical damage to your eyes (and hasn't since 1968, when the FDA prohibited TVs from emitting low level X-rays)?!

Or that the world map they used to pull down over the blackboard is distorted and doesn't accurately reflect the real world? (You mean Greenland and Africa aren't the same size? And Europe and North America aren't really that big?)

Next thing you know they're going to tell me the United States won't be converting to the metric system, like, any day now.

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